NEWS: Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde @ Newcastle Castle

1920 film Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde finds a suitably unnerving home with a screening at Newcastle Castle

By Leigh Venus
on Friday, November 27th, 2015

Earlier this year, the renovated Newcastle Castle threw their doors open after a £1.67m refurbishment which saw the much-loved Keep joined by new attraction the Black Gate, the Castle’s ancient gatehouse.

Working to transform the historic site into a place to be entertained as well as educated, the Castle team are to follow up their unforgettable sold-out screening of 1922 horror classic Nosferatu (reviewed here) with an even earlier slice of cinema history – one starring Drew Barrymore’s grandfather to boot – 1920’s Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde. The screening is taking place in the aforementioned Black Gate – which had come to house a conglomeration of slum tenements (and even a pub!) by the early Victorian period, but on Sunday 6th December, it screens this classic film, as part of their Silents In The Castle series.

Based on Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella published a scant 34 years earlier, the tale of two men living in one body drew upon Victorian obsession with good and evil, the conflict between the effete Henry Jekyll and the violent Edward Hyde showcasing the duality of man and the hidden horrors we all suppress within.

“Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is all about the dark underbelly of Victorian society” the Castle’s Peter Cumiskey told us, “by the 19th century the Castle ruins had essentially become a slum community, home to all sorts of shady businesses and taverns of ill repute, so Mr Hyde would probably have felt right at home!”

Writing the original book while bed-ridden and sick (or high on cocaine and ergot depending on which biographer you believe), Stevenson’s strange tale was an immediate sensation which become a classic of literature, inspiring over 123 adaptations to date in film alone, with the sixth now finding a suitably unnerving home at The Black Gate.

Peter promises this isn’t the last we’ll see either.

“We’re hoping to make this a regular thing, particularly during winter when the weather is dark and gloomy. It can be chilly, but if you wrap up warm the Keep more than makes up for it in atmosphere!”